


Tin Man

by Sheffield



Series: Archenemy [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Dark!Mycroft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-16
Updated: 2012-07-16
Packaged: 2017-11-10 02:18:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/461175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheffield/pseuds/Sheffield
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Mycroft really is Sherlock's arch enemy, what will happen if he exercises his power?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tin Man

Ringpulls, he muttered. Welcome to the twenty-first century, your baked beans came in a ring pull can. Unless you were too stupid or too cheap or too damned up yourself to notice that you were buying the other kind. Dammit! Other people didn't have broken fingers. And they had can openers. Wall-mounted electric can openers. Battery operated one-touch gadgets in case they did have broken fingers. Old fashioned butterfly-winged manual openers for if they didn't.

There was a can opener on his penknife, but it was an army penknife and he'd had a spectacular flashback last time he'd used it and which would be worst? Sherlock comes back and finds you sobbing under the kitchen table fondling a revolver, or Sherlock comes back and finds you've stripped every nook and cranny in the kitchen trying to work out where a sociopath who keeps eyeballs in the microwave thinks it appropriate to keep the simple. Fucking. Tin-opener.

The drawer under the breadbin was stuffed with paper and he tipped it onto the kitchen table. Paydirt! A pair of handcuffs, an ivory swizzle stick, a piece of carved rock that was, very possibly, an Ancient Egyptian trepanning knife and, bingo! An Ikea tin opener.

He started to smooth out the papers to put them back in the drawer.

***

"Sherlock? Can you come in here for a moment, please?"  
"I distinctly remember buying beans. And milk, I might add."  
"Yes, that's not what this is about..."  
"Oh..."  
Sherlock tried for disdain, for "oh, those old things," but the noise he made was a lot more "Oh no. No" than John liked. John was sitting down, the papers organised into neat and logical piles on the coffee table. Sherlock sprawled at the other side of the room, arms spread along the back of the sofa, head slightly turned to look at something more interesting.

"Sherlock!"   
"You haven't been to work. Your employers will... no, have already... asked you to leave."  
"We're not talking about me at the moment. We're talking about you. And your brother."

Sherlock put his feet up on the sofa and started to search his coat pockets. He unwound his scarf and let it fall to the floor, and then felt underneath the sofa cushions for a nicotine patch.

"Sherlock. It looks to me..."  
"Mrs Hudson has acquired a... follower, I think we must call him. Not a plumber, not exactly, but the owner of a plumbing firm. And a rather spectacularly good cook."  
He added a second patch, further up his arm.  
"I don't really want to talk about Mrs Hudson and her gentleman friends either, thank you. Sherlock, have you been sectioned?"

Sherlock added the third patch and then closed his eyes and added a fourth.  
"It's of no importance."

"No importance? Sherlock, your brother - the man who had me carted off to his own private Guantanamo bay to get you to obey him - has had you sectioned. He controls your bank account... oh. Oh. That's why you never bother about money..."  
"It's a convenient arrangement all round."  
"Sherlock, according to this you have a trust fund. You have a ... well, I was going to say substantial, but actually it's bloody gigantic, income, and you can't get at any of it because your evil twin-"  
"He's not my twin-"  
"It's a phrase. Because Mycroft has... Sherlock, this is... abusive."

Sherlock raised an eyebrow. John wasn't usually so ... vehement.

***

There was a clear distinction, it seemed, between the "throw a bag over your head and bundle you into a van" kind of invitation and the "sleek black car draws up alongside you and opens its doors" kind. Small mercies, eh? he thought. Tea and cakes in a warehouse in Wapping beat waking up stark naked in a padded cell helpfully furnished with a set of scrubs and a surveillance camera.

"Mycroft," he said flatly.  
"Dr Watson. Always a pleasure."  
John kept his hand in his pocket. His leg was aching and his hand wanted to tremble but he was damned if he was going to sit down and drink tea as if... as if...  
"Do sit down, John, before you actually fall down. I'm sorry you were so... inconvenienced... by our last little discussion but I do assure you it was a matter of the gravest importance to national security."  
"A nation with a private death squad isn't really the one I signed up to, thanks."

He sat down. Less humiliating than falling on his backside, anyway. And accepted a cup of tea, because, after all, if Mycroft were in fact going to poison him then no doubt someone with a needle was waiting in the wings if he didn't drink up anyway. And the little iced cakes were from Fortnums and rather good actually.

"Well, now that we have the pleasantries out of the way, perhaps we can get to the reason for this meeting."  
John was busy polishing off his third cake but made a helpful "go on" noise through a mouthful of melting gorgeousness...  
"Let me make this very simple, Doctor. Back off."

John wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, "What, that's it? 'Back. Off?"  
"Just so. If you know what's good for you, that is,"  
"That's all you've got? No threats, no bribery, no blackmail? You expect me to just... what? Sit back and take it? Let you walk all over your brother's rights, have him wrongfully sectioned, steal his money, basically abuse him. And I'm going to... just let you? Is that it?"  
"Oh yes, Dr Watson, I really believe it is. My brother needs to be controlled and as his closest family I am the person responsible for controlling him. I make sure that he has a place to live, enough to live on, therapeutic hobbies. I may even let him keep you, since you amuse him. But, hear this, I will not have you interefering. You've already seen what happens to you when you get in my way. Just take a friendly word of advice and don't do it again."  
"Or what?"  
"Or... Sherlock may require inpatient treatment. At one of the... less accommodating hospitals. I believe there's a new treatment centre where they use sensory deprivation to calm patients down. I'm sure a mind like Sherlock's would find the experience therapeutic - what do you think? Or perhaps he might be prescribed electroshock..."  
"I'm a doctor. Or had you forgotten? I won't allow it."  
"Oh Doctor Watson, doctors are easy to find! I can find ten doctors happy to sign up to Sherlock's need for inpatient treatment in less time than it will take you to finish drinking your tea."  
"But you know Sherlock doesn't need to be sectioned. There's nothing wrong with him... well, except a little antisocial personality disorder, but he's high functioning and capable of independent living. And useful work."  
"He's only useful if he's useful to me. You do understand that, now there's a good chap?"

Mycroft turned on his heel and walked away and his assistant opened the car door. Seemed the interview was over.

***

John Watson was a patient man. He had kept in touch with most of his graduating class in an old loose-leaf address book dating from the days before you routinely kept email addresses - hell, from the days before most people HAD email addresses. Updating it onto his phone and laptop made for a nice quiet hobby. He had army friends, medics and non-medics, privates and corporals and sargeants and lieutenants and a couple of captains, majors, a brigadier or two, even a general whose leg he'd stitched back on. He worked down them systematically, phoning the ones where he didn't have an email address, making an electronic address book of his life, backing up his work on the little portable hard drive he kept forgetting to pick up from Lestrade's office. People Sherlock had helped kept contacting him on his blog. He knew most of the restauranteurs in London would happily feed Sherlock and whoever he was with, but when you put all their email addresses together together with the ones he had already it wasn't so much an address book as a database. 

When the men in white coats came for Sherlock he was ready. He couldn't prevent them taking him - Mycroft was smarter than that, he whisked him away while John was out looking for another job. But John took out his phone and pressed a button. The "I need help" app was designed to send out an email if you were lost or injured. John's sent one out to everyone in his database.

His network of medical contacts gave him Sherlock's location in half an hour, and the legal and judicial people on the list had the injunction in his hands almost at the same time that he reached the gates with half a dozen ex army lads who felt they owed the doc a favour - and Lestrade for backup.

"It's all right," he said, ripping off the headphones, "it's over, I've got you." It was soft restraints, headphones and eyepieces, not a full sensory deprivation tank. Lestrade was ripping into the restraints so he focused on the eyepieces, complicated things with tapes and pads, all the while keeping up the litany of reassurance. "We're here, Lestrade and me, half the bloody British army, that barrister whose divorce you prevented, remember him? It's all right..."

And then Sherlock was free, curled up tight against his side like a child in a storm and Lestrade had found Sherlock's coat from somewhere and put it round both of them and then went off to stop the lads from tearing the bloody place down.

***

"You are an annoying man, Dr Watson."  
"Thanks."

There weren't any cakes this time. Pity.

"The You Tube gambit was particularly interesting. I congratulate you. I assume we're not being recorded on that clever little phone of yours right now?"  
"You know what they say about 'assume'" he deadpanned. Although the goon who'd dragged him into the car this time had confiscated his phone and then frisked him thoroughly enough to make him wonder if he should have paid for dinner and a movie first.  
"You have made my life just annoying enough that I am going to let you have control of Sherlock - provided he still works for me on demand, of course - and yet not quite annoying enough that I am willing to risk sending him over some final edge by removing you permanently. I congratulate you, Doctor. It was finely judged."  
"Um... thanks. I think."

***

"Beans come in ring pull cans, you know."  
"I'm perfectly aware of that, thank you. I simply prefer the other kind."  
"You can tell by the taste?"  
"Hardly. But there's something about the struggle that pleases me."  
"the...?"  
"Irresistible force against immoveable object. With only a tin opener to rely on."  
"Daft prat," he said. And made the toast.


End file.
